Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys. She writes with the spleen and misanthropy of Celine. She spits contempt and scorn like a cornered snake. Get close enough and she'll poison you with a virulent cynicism for which there is no known antidote. Why even bother to argue that it's fiction, that Sasha Jensen, the narrator of "Good Morning, Midnight" isn't Jean Rhys herself, telling us straight out what life has been like for her? Read her biography and the events of her life and fiction coalesce; they blend far more exactly than they do for most authors.
"One day, quite suddenly, when you're not expecting it, I'll take a hammer from the folds of my dark cloak and crack your little skull like an egg-shell. Crack it will go, the egg-shell; out they will stream, the blood, the brains. One day, one day...the fierce wolf that walks by my side will spring on you and rip your abominable guts out. One day, one day...Now, now, gently, quietly, quietly..."
It's unnerving to read passages of such seething rage from any serious writer, but it's even more shocking, more unexpected, when these lines are penned by a woman. Not that women don't feel this way, surely they do, but if they do, they aren't supposed to admit it. Neither are men, for that matter, but we aren't quite as shocked by it when they do. Right there alongside Celine, Miller, Genet, Burroughs, Houellebecq and Bukowski, put Jean Rhys. She is nothing if not willing to say what it is not permitted to say.
Faites comme les autre. That, Rhys declares, has been her motto all her life. "Do as the other." In other words, life is lived in enemy territory. Survival is a matter of camouflage. Pantomime normality. You must appear to fit in at all costs—or pay the consequences. Let them see you're different and you're finished. They'll start hurling stones. They'll crush you like a bug.
"Please, please, monsieur et madame, mister, missis and miss, I am trying so hard to be like you. I know I don't succeed, but look how hard I try. Three hours to choose a hat; every morning an hour and a half trying to make myself look like everybody else...And, mind you, I know that with all this I don't succeed. Or I succeed in flashes only...But think how hard I try...Think—and have a bit of pity. That is, if you ever think, you apes, which I doubt."
I laughed out loud reading this last line. Because she's right. Most people don't ever think. They simulate thinking; they furrow their brows, they scratch their scalps, they stroke their jaws. But they don't actually think. They never have a single original thought. You wonder if they are actually even alive in any meaningful sense of that term.
Rhys seems divided. Her efforts to blend in with everyone else mask a part of herself that genuinely seems to wish it could be so. Yet the cost of belonging is to become an unthinking ape, or, as she says elsewhere, a "walking tree." Does she really want that? It would amount to a suicide-in-life; she would exist as one of the walking dead. In the end, its this very schism that leads her to acts of chronic self-sabotage, that undermines her best efforts to fit in, and that ultimately marks her as someone who doesn't and will never belong. And still it abides: this basic human need to fit in, to be accepted. It is the root cause her incurable suffering.
"Good Morning, Midnight" reads with the immediacy of a blog. Every emotion is on display. Nothing is held back, nothing is too embarrassing to admit. Even as she hurls insults, she cries, literally, for love and attention, for the youth and beauty she has lost and will never regain. Now, after years spent chasing passion, sensation, and novelty, she faces the aftermath of a "morning after" that will last another thirty years—unless she kills herself, which she seems to be constitutionally unable to do. Instead, she exists in a purgatory of depression, unable to go forward or backward. Here's her "life-plan:"
"I'll lie in bed all day, pull the curtains, and shut the damned world out...There was a monsieur, but the monsieur has gone. There was more than one monsieur, but they have all gone. What an assortment! One of every kind."
Her financial situation neatly accentuates and perpetuates this gray limbo. An unexpected albeit meagre inheritance provides her with just enough means to stay alive, if rather shabbily. Without this bequest, you get the sense that she might easily have ended up living on the streets, or at last becoming desperate enough to fling herself into the Seine. Life or death? It isn't a choice she makes: when she comes to the fork in the road between existence and non-existence she simply takes the path of least resistance. Now, living in reduced circumstances, she wants nothing more than to stay under the radar, where her poverty and fading looks won't show. If anything sustains her—perhaps it's better to say "entertains" her—it's a sense of the absurdity of her existence.
"When I think of my life it seems to me so comical that I have to laugh. It has taken me a long time to see how comical it has been, but I see it now."
She has reached a state of hyper-consciousness which she describes as being "plunged in a dream, when all the faces are masks and only the trees are alive and you can almost see the strings that are pulling the puppets. Close-ups of human nature-isn't it worth something?"
Our narrator has seen the carnival of life for the meaningless merry-go-round ride that it is and her fellow riders stripped to the bare bone. It isn't a pretty sight. This is life as it isn't meant to be seen. Under the pretty fictions we tell ourselves about "love" is the unadorned truth. Life is cruelty unbound. A dog-eat-dog pursuit of individual survival far too brutal to bear if one still cares, still believes in the fiction.
"People talk about the happy life, but the happy life is when you don't care any longer if you live or die. You only get there after a long time and many misfortunes. And do you think you are left there? Never. As soon as you have reached this heaven of indifference, you are pulled out of it. From your heaven you have to go back to hell. When you are dead to the world, the world often rescues you, if only to make a figure of fun of you."
And, sure enough, it is a man that "rescues" the narrator from her addiction to the blessed narcotic of indifference. One last suitor, who, ironically, plays the young gigolo to her older woman—a role reversal of the days when she played the ingenue to a series of older, financially secure men. Of course, our narrator sees the farcical nature of her situation and cynically plays her part, if only to wink jadedly at the audience, as if to say "You see how it is, don't you?" She also discovers a new-found power in her role; now she is the one who can control the game, withhold the rewards that a young lover seeks. The tragicomedy is that even knowing what she knows, she still can't help but grasp at what she clearly sees is the illusion of love, beauty, and desire that her young lover ostensibly offers, albeit at a price.
What does Rhys want anyway? She has led her life in a defiantly unorthodox way and now she complains that she is excluded from the status quo. She has never made any provisions for her future and has none stored up now that her future is now. She's burned the proverbial candle at both ends, living day by day, moment by moment, depending on her youth and beauty to see her through. Now she finds herself alone, poor, and aging. The party is over and one suspects that what she wanted most was for the party to never end. That she should always remain young and beautiful and therefore strong enough to thumb her nose at those who now looked down their noses at her. What she wanted was the impossible.
And that is ultimately what "Good Morning, Midnight" chronicles. That moment of awakening when we realize that what we wanted most in life was impossible. That every awakening is a death and what follows is a period of mourning and morning. Rhys describes this transitional phase in all it's horror, pathos, and absurd comedy. Everything is at stake when nothing seems to matter. Do we give up and die once and for all or somehow begin a new life? That is the question that faces the narrator of "Good Morning, Midnight" during her long dark night of the soul.
It's a question we all face in one form or another, sooner or later, and not just once, but many times. The answer we give each time defines our lives.
Rhys's answer will certainly not satisfy everyone. But it allowed her to continue. And from one perspective, at least, namely one's own, to continue is the most important thing of all.
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